Making a crust as a composer has always been a challenging task. Even a person with the mind-boggling fluency of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had his financial struggles, a frequent topic in letters to his father. Crucial to staying afloat was his career as a performer – evidenced by his output of piano concertos, which he produced regularly after moving to Vienna in 1781.
While Mozart’s piano concertos could seem over familiar to us today, in the composer’s time they often posed a significant challenge. With few rehearsals – perhaps a run through or two – sight-reading Viennese musicians would have to keep up with the composer’s difficult and unusual music while he led from the piano, embellishing his solo parts with frequent improvisational flourishes.
Is there a way to defamiliarize Mozart’s concertos? One method could be to perform them in chamber arrangements, something being done by pianist Cristian Sandrin and the London Mozart Players, who perform Piano Concertos 13, 22 and 23 at Oxford’s Holywell Music Room and London’s Kings Place in April. In arrangement for four strings and piano, it will be a chance to hear Mozart’s concertos in a more direct and intimate light.
In fact, this type of performance was something Mozart himself proposed. For the first three concertos he presented in Vienna, in 1782–83, Mozart advertised ‘quattro’ versions – ie. that they could be performed with only a string quartet of solo strings, omitting woodwind and brass parts. Indeed, Sandrin and the LMP perform the third of these, Concerto no. 13 K.415. Mozart being Mozart though, even this relatively light piece begins with a fugato.
By 1785, Mozart’s orchestration of his piano concertos was becoming significantly more elaborate. The well-known Concerto no. 22 in E-flat, which like other concertos of the same year even includes trumpets and timpani in the orchestra, will require adroit work to reduce the orchestral parts for a string quartet only. Beginning with one of the composer’s characteristic ‘loops’ – where an opening melodic gambit is stated twice – Mozart contrasts the orchestral fanfare with answering phrases in bassoons and horns, clarinets and flutes. These instruments show up in isolated roles in other places too, accompanying the solo piano, so any chamber arrangement will need to capture this interplay and contrast.
Did Mozart improvise cadenzas for this concerto? As with other concertos of 1785, no written cadenzas survive, and today pianists often put together their own, or use those written by others (Saint-Säens even wrote a cadenza for this concerto). Mozart certainly was busy at the time, in the middle of composing Le nozze di Figaro, echoes of which can be heard in many places, perhaps especially in the jovial Rondo third movement.
Mozart certainly did write a cadenza for his next concerto: indeed it is written into the score of the first movement. Sandrin and the LMP also perform no. 23 in A major, completed in March 1786, one of the best loved of Mozart’s pieces in the genre. In contrast with its E-flat predecessor, the A major is definitely more introverted – the trumpets and timpani are gone – and the Adagio second movement is especially sorrowful, in the key of F-sharp minor, rare in Mozart’s public works of this kind. After the plaintive solo piano introduction, the answering phrase in the high clarinet will need to be handled deftly when transferred to solo violin in this arrangement.
Nevertheless, Mozart’s opera buffa mood returns in the Rondo finale, which like that of the E-flat concerto does much to recall Figaro, which premiered a few weeks after this concerto was first performed. Even the Rondo has a stormy F-sharp minor section, which like a passing squall seems to dematerialise as soon as it arrives, with jaunty major mode melodies appearing in pairs of winds. Clearly Mozart was happy with sharp dramatic contrasts in his instrumental works of the period.
One item of piano concerto performance practice that modern pianists have to make decisions about is whether to play continuo during the tuttis. Today, on modern instruments, this practice is rare. But bass lines are usually written into piano solo parts, even sometimes with Mozart’s own figures. Pianos of the late 18th century were strung in parallel, with leather-covered hammers and sounded a little more like harpsichords, at least to modern ears, so playing continuo does not seem so out of character.
However, for Sandrin and the LMP, this question is more acute. Should you reinforce a tutti with a modern piano when you have only a string quartet? And if so, how to write the piano part, so as not to overdominate the strings? Or should one consign the piano to the solo sections only, and be content with a ‘lighter’ tutti? Or some mix of approaches? (Sandrin points out that Alfred Brendel adopted this approach in his recording of Piano Concerto no. 12 with the Alban Berg Quartet, adding in the missing wind parts from the piano, but “very lightly, and only during the tuttis, retouching the music of the string quartet with unexpected sonorities.”)
As the orchestrations of Mozart’s piano concertos became more elaborate, so too became their structures, with dramatic contrasts, episodes and unexpected twists. Concerto form is already complicated as it is, with a ‘double’ expositional structure in their first movements, basically unheard of in chamber music. Managing all this drama with reduced forces is a challenge for any arranger.
“I uncovered unexpected connections between various themes accross the concertos, during the process of re-writing the orchestral score,” Sandrin says. “It made me realise that the overflow of constant new melodies and tunes from these later concertos are part of a complex web of motifs, something that I would have normally associated with Beethoven’s music.”
“The simple act of re-writing music down enforces certain connections in the brain. In one sense, it is an remarkable method to internalise the music and the orchestral score.”
For those curious to hear Mozart’s piano concertos in a new light, Sandrin and the London Mozart Players’ concerts are definitely worth a look.
Cristian Sandrin and the London Mozart Players perform Mozart’s Piano Concertos at Holywell Music Room on 23rd April and Kings Place on 27th April.
This article was sponsored by The Kettner Society.
